Over the past several years, I’ve written articles and columns in Roofing Contractor about Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and how they will be used in sustainable building design and selection. Essentially, third-party certified EPDs provide a standard approach for disclosing the environmental impacts of products in a way to allow comparison among similar products using well-known environmental measures. In the green-building market, EPDs are destined to become very popular due to their inclusion under several credits in the latest version of the LEED Green Building Rating System. In response to anticipated demand for the information contained in EPDs, many building-material manufacturers have been active in developing and publishing third-party certified EPDs.
Many of the first EPDs to be published involved interior products such as floors, ceilings and furnishings. More recently, however, roofing and insulation manufacturers have joined the EPD movement. If you’re looking for roofing products that meet the new EPD credit in LEED v4, a list of companies and products that can immediately help you is shown in a table on the next page of this article.